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NSA Broke Privacy Rules Thousands of Times Per Year, Audit Finds
NettiWelho writes "The Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents. Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls."
broad new powers
Now congress HAS to do something about it!
We (the people) gave them a little power, and they grossly over stepped the bounds.
Thank God Snowden exposed the NSA programs so that now they are finally being scrutinized.
The question left is, what are we(the people) going to do about it?
I vote for dissolving the NSA and DoHS.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
You can trust us.
-- NSA
I would like to meet someone (adult) that's surprised by these news.
I would like to know his answer to the question: "At which point in human history and in which location has a government not spied on its own citizens?".
I often wonder if people understand what "secret" means.
Anyone else reminded of the Tuttle/Buttle debacle in Brazil?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Seriously. Do you think any federal employee will get sent to prison or dismissed?
The NSA and its employees pose a similar problem as Guantanamo, just the reverse. Do you really want all of these people run around in the wild after all that happened? You cannot dismiss or punish them because it would just turn their special knowledge and skills against you in the long run.
“You look at a number in absolute terms that looks big, and when you look at it in relative terms, it looks a little different.” I guess this means, if you look at it from the relative perspective of how many people we spy on, over 2000 isn't really that great a number.
Oh that's right. Asking our government to hold itself accountable is farcically funny...
Time to go back to "sneakernet" and face-to-face communications. Since we now know that even encrypting your data may not be a fool-proof way to secure our communications from prying governement/corporatocracy eyes.
We might as well shred the Constitution and start over again. Our governement "by the people and for the people" doesn't abide by it anyway. :-(
2776 for one year = 27,760,000 USD fines. Although this sort of mass scale violation should be considered a larger crime.
2776 with five years per violation is 13,880 years of jail time.
However consider more closely that these errors likely affect thousands to tens or even hundreds of thousands citizens privacy. instead of looking at all information from Egypt they looked at all of the communications for Washington DC. Extrapolating those numbers out to the reality of how much private information and how many people were illegally spied upon by the NSA and you can safely say this would bankrupt the executive branch pretty quickly.
Broke the rules? Overstepped its legal authority?
Is that the euphemism we're using now for "broke the law"?
Back in the day, all it took was one honest U.S. Attorney to see something like this and get a grand jury to indict the culpable officials, acting independently of corruption from above. Hell, a good lawyer could probably make a grand jury case for a RICO indictment against the whole administration.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
See, they told us about it! Surely we can trust them. Don't worry next month we'll get some new tidbit after this calms down, as they "turn up the heat a little more".
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
Last year there were 900-odd total including 195 FISA act violations and roughly 700 violations of executive orders.
Of the FISA act violations: they break it down further:
This is not evidence of a vast conspiracy to deprive you of your rights. It's evidence of people failing to do things properly.
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law. If they were always ignoring the law, that means the NSA would hardly be searching anything. If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors. I think both of those scenarios are implausible. Nobody believes there are just a couple thousand searches per year and I doubt the NSA is good enough and careful enough to get 99.9% compliance. At the very limit of plausibility, they are not listening to all your phone calls.
Two other groups that need to be thanked for all of this is the DoJ and the journalists. If the DoJ hadn't had gone and obtained the phone records of some journalists this would have probably been quietly brushed aside. You know cause the journalists don't want to get shut out but now all bets are off and the news agencies are happy to report on things that effect them.
The findings conveniently move the goalposts - it implies that the issue is that the spying is being done incorrectly, not that it's being done at all; if it were done "correctly" we would never know, which was the NSA's original win condition.
Yep. We're fucked.
It's not just on Slashdot, but generally in the press.
They broke laws, not just 'rules', yet the words 'illegal', 'law', 'constitutional rights' are nowhere to be found in the press coverage.
U.S. attorneys are employed by the department of justice. The head of the department is Attorney General Eric Holder, on record for multiple perjury before congress in the context of clandestine operations. Do you really think Holder will give the "goahead" to indict him and his cronies?
Think again.
The NSA didn't break the Holy Copyright laws. Therefore, they're safe from prosecution. It's not like they stole quadrillions of US dollars from the public by recording their private phone calls ("stealing" their conversations) without prior consent and license. Or did they? It would be interesting if people starting suing the NSA for copyright violations instead of "mere" violation of their privacy. Now that would hurt the NSA, if they got convicted.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
...We can do that.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
We already know the answers but the important question you forgot to ask is how will the current administration handle this? Or course we know that answer too with the appointment of James Clapper to conduct the independent review of the NSA. It's pretty clear that poor decision making is still occuring to this day.
And do they think it's mere coincidence that the current president of Russia used to be the head of the KGB?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
A few interesting tidbits to share...
1) The documents reports 2776 violations of American privacy in just the 12 months ending in May 2012. Oh, and that's only for their Fort Meade data center and a few others in D.C. area, rather than for all of their data centers across the U.S.. They acknowledge the number would be significantly higher if it included all of them. Oh, and those are the number of incidents that occurred, not the number of Americans who were violated in each incident, which is actually a much higher number but isn't reported.
2) They quadrupled their oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009. And the results? Between 2011 and 2012, the number of infractions nearly doubled. Not halved, doubled.
3) They accidentally collected a "large number" of calls for people in Washington D.C. when there was a mixup between the international code for Egypt (20) and the area code for D.C. (202). No disclosure on what they meant by "large number", but considering the severity of other infractions, it has to be pretty large.
4) They didn't report the Egypt/D.C. mixup to the organization that oversees/audits them, nor to Congress or anyone else outside the agency, because it was deemed irrelevant to any of them. It was deemed irrelevant since "there were no defects to report", to quote a March 2013 report on the issue.
5) "Incidental" information on Americans that is collected when targeting foreigners is regularly allowed to enter their database and is freely searchable from then on. They don't count these as violations, nor do they report them, and they are apparently pervasive under their current way of doing things.
6) In one violation, they hijacked a fiber line going through the U.S. and temporarily held onto all data going through it so that they could process it. This went on for several months before the FISC ruled that what they were doing was a violation of the 4th Amendment since they were incapable of filtering out the communication of American citizens. FOIA requests have been submitted for the ruling, but the Obama administration is apparently working to block the requests.
Geez. After reading something like this, I can see why no one around here reads the articles. They're way too depressing.
'cause I don't give a shit about what dimwits say.
Seriously, that guy is more whack than Wheelchair-Goebbels ever was.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To get that, first of all you'd have to get a new batch of politicians who'd at least THINK of possibly considering implementing an amendment like that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm more shocked that it's met with a collective shrugging of shoulders and as much as a "tsk" uttered by those that SHOULD react to it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Here is a person who was surprised by the audit results and had not seen them: Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Head of the Senate Intelligence committee, directly in charge of congressional oversight of the NSA.
The states all have laws which kind of mirror the federal laws for wiretapping and such. What is to stop a states attorney general from getting convictions? Why does the federal government have to do everything?
National No Shit Day
Funny, I can't. It does not mention citizens vs. not. It simply says "The right of the People". Weird.
And the declaration of independence specifically says "all men". Granted, women and black people don't count on that one, we had to fix that later. Sigh. Yes, I know the Declaration is NOT the constitution.
Point is, this whole thing about the laws not counting against non americans is Crap.
TD
So clearly they roll out their spy system features without seeking FISA court approval.
I guess you can wipe your ass with the Constitution for all it's worth nowadays. :(
Still, over time I've learned that all the NSA monitors are emails entering and leaving the US. That still concerns me because SaskTel leases server space in Florida, which means all my emails are being scanned, even though I'm a Canadian.
I really wouldn't care if they weren't scanning my emails. I'd just snigger and laugh as the poor dumb 'mericans tromp on down the road to a full scale police state.
The sad thing is that is what's happening, and the citizens of the US largely don't give a shit. What a pity they don't even remember what "freedom" means. It's barely been a decade since 9/11 and the majority has been brainwashed into thinking this type of spy system is the way things have always been.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
No argument from me. I was merely reporting my dislike for what I was reading.
How many violations were against ex-wives, ex-girlfriends (or current ones, 'just to be sure'), or that smoking hot girl working at the Hooters nearest NSA HQ?
Setting sex aside, consider greed. How many taps were then followed up with large buy / sell orders in someone else's name (or an alias)?
These might be the real reasons 90% are getting axed: human fucking nature to abuse absolute power for personal gain, satiation, and fear.
The only important question at this point is 'who is actually in charge of this situation'?
Note these...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/01174524199/simple-question-how-could-president-obama-not-know-that-inspector-generals-report-proving-him-liar-was-leaked-as-well.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130816/02462124204/how-could-dianne-feinstein-not-have-seen-report-laying-out-nsa-abuses.shtml
Both Obama and Feinstein are making themselves look STUPID, and that's not something politicians ever willingly elect to do. Now it is certainly possible that the press is capable of outmaneuvering politicians, but odds alone would dictate a different result eventually. But at every step along this garden path the figureheads have done and said the exact opposite thing as they should be doing or saying.
It's as if this is scripted. That worries me.
How is a government subsidized tradein for a new car destroying wealth? Seem more like aid in purchasing a capital good to me.
It wasn't the subsidy or the new car that destroyed capital, it was all the strings (like come attached to every government grant or subsidy). The "strings" in this case said that your trade-in, regardless of age or utility, had to be destroyed and crushed.
It even described how. First, you had to drain all the oil from the engine, add a sand/silica mixture to the cooling system, then you had to run the engine until it froze up. What was left of the car had to be crushed. This meant that not only were all those cars destroyed, but the ones left on the road are harder to find parts for because all the engine parts were destroyed and everything else was crushed. You can find lots of videos of engines being destroyed on the interwebs.
The value in all those destroyed cars was far greater than anything that was created by the incentives. And in the long term it hurts the poorest the most, who need transportation for jobs and keep their cars longer and rely on older cars to be reasonable to buy.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
1917 US enters WW1 1941 The US enters WW2
Are you seriously arguing we should have stayed out of those wars? It wouldn't have mattered which party was in the white house. They are called WORLD wars for a reason.
Republicans are hawks, Democrats enter us in some of the biggest wars.
You seem to have left out the two gulf wars as well as Afganistan, all of which were stared under republican presidents. You also failed to mention that our involvement in Vietnam actually started MUCH earlier (in the 1950s) than you claim and both republican and democrat presidents share the burden of our involvement there.
Republicans are supposed to be for family values, but how many get caught in extramarital affairs?
They aren't for "family values". The term family values is a cynical political marketing term used to mask fear of families that aren't white, conservative and christian. It's a way of pandering to the religious right.
Democrats want to help the minorities. But almost the entire party fought the civil rights movement.
Conveniently your characterization of the Democrats ignores the changes that happened after 1964. Those same democrats who were against civil rights (virtually all of them southerners) switched to the republican party and have stayed there ever since. 93% of Southern Democrats and 100% of Southern Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But don't let actual facts get in your way of pretending that the current democrats are the same people.
No one can because it isnt there. Was never intended to be there. This conceit that it's ok to have our government violating rights all around the world in pursuit of whatever goals and there is no legal problem as long as US Citizens are exempted is the original sin of our current age.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law.
This is a secret program and the only thing you can be sure of is that your do NOT have all the facts. This is an agency and a program that has NO accountability to the electorate. They operate in secret, their findings are secret, their actions on those findings are secret, their oversight is toothless and secret, and we can't even fight against the program because we cannot prove we were harmed and thus can't prove standing in front of a judge. Exactly how stupid do you have to be to think that the NSA is to be trusted unconditionally based on a tiny bit of leaked information?
If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors.
Even if they were 100% in compliance it STILL would be a violation of our 4th amendment rights. The NSA's actions have never come under serious judicial review. The FISA court is a rubber stamp fig leaf of a justification. You can loudly proclaim that this program is "legal" all you want but that doesn't make it so nor does it make it right. Jim Crow laws once were "legal" but they still were wrong and ultimately unconstitutional. Furthermore even if we take your 900 number at face value (and in reality I do not) that is 900 people who were unlawfully deprived of their civil rights in some manner. Even one is too many.
I wonder who all the scrap was sold to? It must have depressed the price of scrap metal for a period of time. Someone got a US taxpayer subsidized bargain.
...which party is at fault for one transgression or another, when it should be readily apparent by now that neither major party is working for the people's interests. The more people distracted in red vs blue finger-pointing, the less focus is on the real problems. There is no benefit in party loyalty.
It's not weird, it's by design. The constitution does not contain such language because then all the government would have to do is revoke your citizenship and they could do whatever they wanted without it being unconstitutional. It'd be a loophole large enough to drive a spy satellite through.
Far as I know the scrap mostly went to China.
Which coincided with a 4x increase in the price of anything made from iron.
How much relationship there is between 'em I leave as an exercise for others.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?